This came from backing the Ruins of Symbaroum kickstarter, I liked what I previously got from Free League as part of the Forbidden Lands project so I went for one of the juicy tiers and in came a nice cache of stuff.
The unpacked Kickstarter haul
For this I wanted to take a look through the GMs guide to see how, if at all, Ruins of Symbaroum differentiated from every other dark fantay setting out there. The dark fantasy setting niche being somewhat stuffed, starting from grand-daddy Ravenloft up through the original Midnight d20 through to European contenders like Shadows of Esteren and the original Symbaroum. Original Symbaroum has good word-of-mouth so when I saw this 5e adaptation I jumped for it.First impressions of the whole package once unboxed? Gorgeous. Great finish, lovely evocative art, a harmonious style to the whole thing. Throughout I found a level of polish that was reminiscent of Worlds Without Number - it felt like an extensively tested flag-ship settings where the team had a clear vision of how it should feel.
So what do you get in the book?
Opening with 12 pages of Guidelines - what is a GM, what is their role at the table.
Next we get 38 pages on the worlds covering elements like factions and locations
Then we get 36 pages on expeditions and how to do wilderness journeys and encounters
Next comes 50 pages on adventure design
Last of the system is 40 pages of optional rules
The book closes with a 7 page adventure "Blight Night"
Chunk by chunk the Guidelines have a nice round up of advice and overview of how the rules should play at the table. Much of the second part is a reframe of core 5e rules but useful to have laid out. The interesting new addition here is corruption, which is intimately bound up with the use of magic and key to making Symbaroum feel different - you *can* flick cantrips around at will but there is a mounting risk of consequences.
The world section starts us in Thistle Hold as a base of operations and gives a gazetteer of places and people of interest there. There are factions to drive intrigue within the walls and treasures and quests to draw you outside into hte great forest of Karvosti. Lots of interesting rocks to flip over in here, good fodder to get going. Kudos for making a "great forest with hostile elves" more interesting than the cliche that those five words imply.
In the expeditions section comes guidance on how to run these building-blocks of Symbaroum - where most of the adventure is assumed to come from our heroes venturing into the great forest seeking treasures or secrets. There is guidance on making the journey in and out important and setting up ruins that will be the focus of such expeditions.
In the adventure design section there is a handy process for creating adventures, with a nice focus on designing the landscape around encounters that is often missing in other sources. There is good advice on running campaigns (a chronicle in Symbaroum) with a definite guide towards campaign climax and directed story which maybe I would set aside for something more 'sandboxy' but good to have.
In the optional rules there are two stand-out elements - social challenges and wars & battles. I like how the social and reputation elements give you rules and ties to place the players within a world and give their actions a sense of consequence more than just treasure and levels. There is a very nice detail in the profiles of faction leaders noting how each is impressed by some skill or attribute, given non-diplomacy focussed characters a chance to contribute meaningfully in social encounters with them.
For the war & battles rules I like the pitched battle rules a lot, giving players the option as time ticks to be heroic, hold the line, or play it safe with risk and effect on the morale of your side and your own reputation going hand-in-hand. I can see this set of mechanics getting pulled into other games I am running, they sit at a nice scale for an adventuring party participating in a grand conflict, not so big your participation feels futile, not so small that the rest of the fight feels irrelevant.
Blight Night show cases some of the unique elements of the settings, corruption and the besieging darkness. Quick, easy to spin up, a nice addition.
Combined with the players guide filled with rule modifications and the bestiary which includes rules on how to adapt OGL and original Symbaroum monsters to Ruins of Symbaroum 5e you get a well thought out complete adaptation of the 5e chassis into something new and interesting. This is not just a 5e reskin, this is a full mod, with elements like the extended rest rules and social rules bringing a nice change to how things play.
Overall, what we get in this is a whole lot of helpful advice and useful tools. This would be a good book to have for any GM, it is a rock solid archetype of what a DMG should be both with enough hand holding to bring along those coming to gaming for the first time but also enough interesting fluff and optional crunch to avoid boring any old hands reading it. In comparison to D&D DMGs this book is lighter on lists of treasure and magic items, spending that page count more on how to run the show.
Other reviews mostly cover the three core books of Player’s Guide, Gamemaster’s Guide, Bestiary together - see Geek Native, Enworld, Dicebreaker, RPGBot and Screenrant.
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